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The FCC Has Fined Robocallers $208M, Collected $6,790

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271–280 of 432 posts

Re: The FCC Has Fined Robocallers $208M, Collected $6,790

#271
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd assume they're mostly fines against foreign or shell companies. What's effectively a shell company is set up to forward calls, then goes out of business when caught.

"Piercing the corporate veil" is a process for dealing with this.

"Massive arrests" is another.

Re: The FCC Has Fined Robocallers $208M, Collected $6,790

#272

Lots of these robocalls are fraudulent. They say nonsense like they're the FBI acting on behalf of the IRS, with a warrant for my arrest. If somebody ran a scam like that through the USPS, they'd become a guest of the US Bureau of Prisons for a few years. Internet DoSers get prison time too. But not these parasites. If the scammers are offshore, an arrest or two in the customs hall at an airport will get peoples' att…

The problem is also that a lot of them are not in the US. We can’t touch them usually.

Unless they leave the country.

If/when they visit a country with... any... positive relations with US/Canada, pounce.

And cutoff their bankers from the US financial system.

India won’t be happy if it starts to lose its call-centre industry as a whole because of some bad actors.

India and the US have extradition treaties.

There’s a lot of ways to put on the pressure.

Re: The FCC Has Fined Robocallers $208M, Collected $6,790

#273
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's better this way. Slippery slope and all. Before you think I'm being alarmist, google drag queen storytime. Edit: if you're downvoting, look it up, there are convicted child sex offenders doing this.

Convicted child sex offenders doing what? I googled "drag queen story hour" and I have no idea how it connects to call blocking and telecoms.

Example of slippery slope.

Re: The FCC Has Fined Robocallers $208M, Collected $6,790

#274
A lot of people point out that telecom companies should do something but aren't because it's lucrative for them or too expensive to fix.

Are telecom companies not realizing how much they are hurting themselves with this in the long term? People will stop using phone numbers altogether. Using the phone has become such a pain, at least in the US, that whenever I can, I used different ways of communicating. WhatsApp, iMesage, Skype, etc. The incessant robocalls have definitely motivated me to move away from traditional phone calls faster than I would otherwise.

Lastly, maybe this is what these companies want, i.e., that I just use their data plan, but then that makes me way less likely to stay loyal.

Re: The FCC Has Fined Robocallers $208M, Collected $6,790

#275
post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No familiarity with SIP. Can it intercept calls to a cell phone with a carrier issued number?

Sssssorta. The cool thing is you need no familiarity with the SIP protocol. What you'd do is port your cell number to the provider, get a new cell number, and then set up a call flow that answers the number, eventually forwarding to your real phone after the caller has a chance to record their name and hit a key.

What about returning a call? do you dial your sip number and input the number you want to be connected to?

I think calling folks back from a number different than what they dialed to reach me.. might defeat the purpose. Thanks for sharing your setup.

Re: The FCC Has Fined Robocallers $208M, Collected $6,790

#277
post #195
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it's bonkers they allow this still. No good actor ISP is going to knowingly let improperly sourced traffic transit networks...

The middle (ntt, gtt, tata, etc) of the internet doesn't know what is or isn't spoofed. The folks at the edge own that responsibility and most colo/hosting shops allow their customers to spoof. Their upstreams are powerless against them since they'll take their money elsewhere.

Lol, that’s not the definition of “powerless”. There are many ISPs more than willing to reject peering with dumpsters.

Re: The FCC Has Fined Robocallers $208M, Collected $6,790

#278
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree completely. I work for a small ISP and we sometimes do the same thing for significant bad actors abusing our network. A phone call to the NOC of the ISP hosting the abuser or the NOC of their upstream transit providers usually gets the ball rolling pretty quickly. That approach is obviously not very effective in a DDoS scenario, but as I understand it these robocalls typically originate from a handful of diff…

Exactly. Creating a proactive system might be difficult, but the apparatus is all there for being reactive. Yet this has been going on for years, so I suspect shenanigans by providers too happy to continue charging their Tier7 peers for access.

I think this a great challenge to propose to the HN crowd. Who wouldn’t pay for a system that truly eliminates the annoyance of spam calls? What about a private network that people could subscribe to that uses a decentralized social credit system? Or one that uses a monitoring gateway to track the number of calls originating from a number (either internal or external to the subscriber group), and treats mass callers with extreme prejudice. A blacklist of known spammers could be applied first as a default (rather than as an add-on app). If you wanted to get really creative, you could give subscribers the tools to add numbers to their own black list far more easily than they now can, and maybe even block whole geographic regions.

Re: The FCC Has Fined Robocallers $208M, Collected $6,790

#280
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(US) Politicians already gave themselves a loophole into unlimited unsolicited spam. So cleaning up other spammers would strengthen the quality of their spam channel, as consumers would be less jaded/more likely to pick up.

Does that loophole also apply to political action committees?

Yes. If the content of the message is "political speech" it is exempted from CAN-SPAM (which also covers cell phone calls) as an extension of first ammendment rights, regardless of who is doing the speaking.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2015/08/...

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